Cokie Roberts relates to Flight 370

Veteran journalist Cokie Roberts, whose father was presumed dead in a plane crash, said Wednesday she feels “terribly” for the families of the victims of the Malaysia Airways Flight 370 crash.

“I really do understand what these families are going through and I feel terribly for them,” Roberts said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday as news broke that searchers located a field of debris in the ocean that could be related to the missing plane, which authorities have concluded went down in the Indian Ocean.

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Roberts’s father, Rep. Hale Boggs Sr. (D-La.), disappeared while on a campaign flight in Alaska in 1972 with Rep. Nick Begich (D-Alaska), father of current Alaska Sen. Mark Begich. The wreckage was never found, but they were later presumed dead.

“My father was lost in a plane and never found. And the search was extensive, it was 39 days, it was the biggest search in American history at that point,” Roberts said as she reflected on the experience. “We brought in our spy planes. … Literally, we wrote the map of Alaska but never found the plane. And there were all these sightings along the way, and people calling and saying that they had heard something, some radio communication, and then the psychics came in and all of that, because people can’t wrap their minds around the idea of a plane just disappearing into the bottom of the sea.”

Roberts said even though her rational mind knew her father was gone, accepting it was “never easy.”

“There was a period of time when I was sort of afraid to change the wallpaper in the kitchen thinking that maybe he’d come confused down the driveway and not recognize the kitchen,” Roberts said. “But that’s an irrational part of you that we all have. The rational part of me said from the beginning, you know this plane is at the bottom of Prince William Sound which is very, very deep and will never be found.”

She said she sees the same difficulty in acceptance in the reactions of the family members of the passengers of Flight 370.

“I know why those families are saying to the Malaysian government, ‘Why are you just telling us that without any proof?’ Well they do have the equivalent of proof, but that’s very hard for people to accept,” Roberts said.